The Triumphant Life of Theodore Roosevelt edited by J. Martin Miller

1 88 WESTWARD HO!
if he keeps in close touch with his fellows ; and
the success of the national Department
of Agriculture has shown how much can be done for him by rational action of the
government. Nor is it only through the Department it can act. One of the great-
est and most beneficent measures passed by the last Congress, or indeed by any
Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation Act. which will do for the States of the
Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain region at least as much as ever has been done
for the States of the humid region by river and harbor improvements. Few meas-
ures that have been put upon the statute books of the nation have done more for the
people than this \a\v will, I firmly believe, directly and indirectly accomplish for the
States in question.
WHAT THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE IS DOING
The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole energy to working for the wel-
fare of farmers and stock-growers. In every section of our country it aids them in
their constantly increasing search for a better agricultural education. It helps not
only them, but all the nation, in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills of
health, and that there is rigid inspection of all meats that enter into interstate com-
merce. Thirty-eight million carcasses were inspected during the last fiscal year.
Our stock-growers sell forty -five million dollars' worth of live stock annually, and
these animals must be kept healthy or else our people wall lose their trade. Our
export of plant products to foreign countries amounts to over six hundred million
dollars a year, and there is no branch of its work to which the Department of Agri-
culture devotes more care. Thus the Department has been successfully introducing
a macaroni wheat from the headwaters of the Volga, which grows successfully in ten
inches of rainfall, and by this means wheat-growing has been successfully extended
westward into the semi-arid region. Two million bushels of this wheat were grown
last year; and, being suited to dry conditions, it can be used for forage as well as
for food for man.
The Department of Agriculture has been helping our fruit men to establish mar-
kets abroad by studying methods of fruit preservation through refrigeration and
thorough methods of handling find packing. On the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and
Texas, thanks to the Department of Agriculture, a rice suitable to the region was
imported from the Orient and the rice crop now is practically equal to our needs in
this country, whereas a few years ago it supplied but one-fourth of them. The most
important of our farm products is the grass crop; and to show what has been done
with grasses. I need only to allude to the striking change made in the entire West by
the extended use of alfalfa.
Moreover, the Department has taken the lead in the effort to prevent the
deforestation of the country. Where there -ire forests we .seek to preserve them;